‘You don’t know how alone you are,’ he went on, ‘until something like that happens. I had friends in Paris – good friends. But it wasn’t the same.’
‘No.’ Mrs Trigg took the dishes from his hands. She had a face like black rock, except for the kindness in her eyes. ‘No, there is nuthin’ the same as that.’ And she moved past him through the kitchen door.
January gathered up his coffee cup and made to follow Preston into the parlor, where new newspapers had been brought in that morning and were being shared around by the boarders as Minou read to Olive and Charmian, Kizzy and tiny Jesse. But a thought took him, and he set down the cup and moved instead through the right-hand door into the hallway – softly gloomy with its single lamp – and to the half-open doorway of the opposite parlor, likewise glowing with muted amber light. Through the opening he could see the room’s sole occupant, slouched in a chair, a whisky bottle on the table before him, full and corked. An empty glass.
Poe’s head was sunk on one hand, like a man for the moment unable to go on.
January tapped at the door.
‘Come.’ The poet straightened and beckoned him to the other chair. ‘How goes the Problem of the Missing Mathematician?’ He sounded sardonic and infinitely tired, but his eyes brightened when January dropped Bill the sweeper’s note on the marble tabletop.
‘Desperate deeds are in order.’
‘Ah.’ Poe shoved bottle and glass aside. ‘So you’ve come to the most desperate man in Washington?’ The tone jested; his eyes didn’t.
‘Well,’ said January in an apologetic tone, ‘I thought of having Mr Viellard back my play at gunpoint when I go after grave robbers in their nest, but somehow I don’t think Madame Viellard would approve.’
‘Lord, what I’d give to see Madame Viellard do it, though!’ Poe gave a crack of genuine laughter. ‘Dress her as a boy, put up her hair under a cap …’
‘Mr Viellard really would kill me, if harm came to her. My sister also, I suspect.’
‘True.’ He picked up the note, studied it with the lamplight gleaming in his dark eyes. ‘And I would hesitate to run afoul of the beautiful Dominique. You’re really going to flush the grave robbers in their nest?’
‘I’m going to try. The problem is, I need someone to go in and start trouble in the King’s Head.’
‘At last!’ The poet sprang up and smote his chest dramatically. ‘I thought this moment would never come. I shall finally have the occasion to use some of what I learned best at West Point – starting trouble. I am, my dear Benjamin, your man. Or—’ He mimed hesitation. ‘Or are you supposed to be my man?’
‘I’ll be your man. You be my man next time.’
‘Very good. On we go!’
They sent Ritchie Trigg to Turvey’s Livery stable a block away on Connecticut Avenue to hire a gig, and then drove through the pitch-black streets of Washington to the Fountain House Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, January perched on the back like a good servant. From the Fountain House they walked to within a few streets of the King’s Head, January’s heart pounding at the prospect of being on these streets at this hour alone. It was close to eleven, a rare, clear night with dull orange lamplight gleaming in the taverns and bordellos and dark figures passing, briefly illuminated by the glow of the windows. The tinkly rattle of out-of-tune piano-music mingled with voices from the doorways: ‘Fook ya’s fer a fookin’ Orangeman, them dice is loaded!’
‘Is it callin’ me a liar ye are?’
‘Damn, and me luck’s gotta turn sometime …’
You HAVE to be drunk, thought January, to believe THAT …
Now and then a man would stagger outside to piss against the wall. Sometimes a woman would speak from the shadows, and a man would go into the dark between the buildings with her – January wondered whether anyone actually believed such an encounter would end in copulation instead of a thwack over the head with a slung shot.
‘I’ll need a half-hour.’ January kindled his dark-lantern and closed the slide. ‘An hour, if you can cause trouble that long without getting pitched out.’
‘My dear Mr January,’ drawled Poe, ‘the very idea! I’m not going to cause trouble. I am merely – with all apologies to your good family and friends – going to harangue the crowd on the subject of abolitionism – contra, not pro – and encourage every man present to express himself as well. After three drinks, no man I have ever encountered can resist the sound of his own voice, and I predict that men will run from all points of the compass to join in the general airing of grievances … Trust me. And watch your back.’
‘And you watch yours, sir. I’ll meet you back at the Fountain House, with whatever evidence against the man I can find.’
It was hard to tell, as January crossed the street toward the alley that ran behind the King’s Head, whether he was being watched or followed: he didn’t think so. He wasn’t sure whether he feared the slave stealers more, or the police. The alley was pitch-black and stank of raw sewage. Something flittered along the ground in the blackness ahead of him. Eyes flashed – rats. Raised voices shouting agreement (‘… it’s the goddam abolitionists that’s causing the problem! The niggers was fine until they come along!’) amply identified the back of the King’s Head, a four-square black block of a building dimly traced by bits of leaked window-light from the street in front of it.
There was a privy in the back but no lantern on the porch. January couldn’t imagine how anyone found their way from the back door to the facility. By the smell of it, nobody bothered. It was as much as his life was worth to slip the slide on his lantern out here, so he fumbled his way by touch to the porch. Once achieved, it was easy to slip under the railing and locate the unlocked back door. No light underneath; it would open into a hall of some sort. If Miss Drail and Mr Pease had any sense, they were in the barroom dispensing drinks and keeping their attention riveted on the crowd, which could turn violent in a heartbeat.
January doubled back long enough to scrape his boot soles carefully on the edge of the porch – a ritual he doubted many customers bothered with – then slipped inside.
A hall, as he’d thought. Doors gave into the barroom and what was presumably a storeroom, padlocked. Light leaked under the inner door, and the noise was a hundred times louder. Poe’s beautiful deep voice, slurred as if with alcohol, soared over the general din: ‘Gentlemen, you cannot convince me that these actions are not a deliberate plot against this nation, a concerted effort by those who seek power for its own sake to undermine and destroy the manhood, the livelihood, the moral force of the men whose courage and strength they could not otherwise vanquish!’ The cheering would have drowned January’s footsteps even if he’d stood on one foot and hopped.
Gingerly, he felt along the walls until he located a narrow stair. At a guess, the proprietress and her sweetheart would live above the back room where the liquor was stored, leaving to the ‘guests’ the front of the building. Presumably, there was a kitchen down here someplace as well, but he wasn’t going to hunt for it.
In the shelter of the stair he slipped the lantern-slide a bare quarter-inch, then moved swiftly upwards. A short hall at the top communicated with two rooms, corresponding as far as January could tell to the storeroom down below and the hypothetical kitchen. The one above the storeroom was the bedroom shared by Miss Drail and Wylie Pease. No door communicated to the front part of the upstairs. To get there, one would have to descend, go through the hall, through the barroom, and presumably up whatever stair ascended from there. Though inconvenient, the arrangement would certainly cut down on the nuisance created by inebriated guests.
January opened the lantern fully and made a search, not difficult save for the comprehensively unclean state of the bedchamber. Rats whisked behind a jumble of trunks. One contained a reeking tangle of dresses, skirts, petticoats and underclothing, none of which had been washed or cleaned, apparently, since the Jefferson administration. In the other two were folded a mix of garments, a few ladies’ dresses, a
couple of the new frock-coats and several of the more old-fashioned cutaways, a dozen shirts and assorted cravats, corsets, stockings and shoes. There were also three halves of petticoats, roughly scissored up the sides. Familiar with the ooze of fluids from the bodies of the dead, January understood what had been cut away. There were no trousers.
In a corner of one trunk lay two coils of hair, one of them brunette and as long and thick as his arm, the other blondish, shorter, but still enough to make a fine wig.
How dare you. For a moment he could feel in his fingers Rose’s curly torrent of hair, Dominique’s dark mane, and his hands shook at the thought. How DARE you?
He had dissected the bodies of the dead, knowing where some of them had come from. He’d pushed aside the knowledge that the naked cadavers delivered to the surgeries in the dead of night were not the only source of income to the men who provided them.
Guilt rose in him like the vomit of sickness, and like sickness he forced it back.
Now is not the time to feel.
A desk stood between the room’s two windows. In one of its drawers January found seven wedding-rings and three gold lockets, two containing miniatures of women and one of a young man. There was also the framed picture of another man. The most elaborate of the lockets he thrust into the pocket of his jacket, and left the others where they were. No sense giving the man the alarm before I can get at him. There were also five small rounds or ovals of ivory, two bearing miniatures of children – a boy and a girl – and the rest only faintly stained, where the watercolor images had been scrubbed off. Three more miniature portraits – like the ivory rounds, unframed – painted on vellum lay at the back of the drawer.
January pocketed one of each, and the only one of the wedding rings which bore an engraving, though the tiny glow of the lantern was far too dim for him to read what it said. It struck him for the first time as curious that Singletary’s pen, watch, and card case had been buried with him. In ordinary circumstances these were things that would have been held for the family of the deceased, not taken to the grave, but if he’d been murdered, why bury these effects, for Wylie Pease to dig up?
The drawer also contained, like trash, dozens of wisps of hair of various colors, dumped out, presumably, from earlier lockets. Each wisp was the echo of a name, testimony to a love too precious to be surrendered even in death.
Footsteps thumped in the storeroom below. A woman’s voice shouted instructions back through the door into the barroom, a ten-word sentence of which six words were obscenities. Fetching more liquor …
The window was closed but the shutters unlatched: Good. He closed his lantern, opened the window, checked – in the dim starlight – that the ground below was clear of broken boxes or encumbering rain-barrels, slid out and, half-sitting on the sill, closed the sash as far as he could before slithering down to the length of his arms. Reaching up with one hand he closed the rest of the sash, then let himself down again and dropped, praying he wouldn’t break an ankle after all his trouble.
He didn’t.
Listening behind him, around him, wary in the darkness as a scared rabbit, he made his way by the quickest and most public route he could find back to the Fountain Hotel.
And now comes the chore, he reflected, of ambushing and blackmailing Wylie Pease.
TWENTY
‘I can’t see a thing!’ protested Henri, when Chloë removed his spectacles to tie a sinister-looking satin mask over his round, good-natured face.
‘The only other person in the carriage is going to be Benjamin,’ Chloë explained firmly. ‘So just point this –’ she handed him a long-barreled cavalry pistol, which he immediately dropped in horror – ‘at the person who isn’t six feet tall and black.’
‘It isn’t loaded, is it?’
‘No, sir.’ January retrieved the weapon from the floor of the Trigg parlor. ‘It’s perfectly safe.’
‘What if Pease is armed?’
‘We’ll disarm him before he gets into the carriage.’
‘What if Pease shouts for the police?’
‘In that neighborhood?’ January’s eyebrows lifted nearly to his hairline. ‘None of his neighbors would ever speak to him again.’
‘That’s the beauty of the plan, sir.’ Poe’s dark eyes sparkled as he pulled on the many-caped coachman’s greatcoat that Seth Berger had lent him. ‘Pease knows perfectly well that in that neighborhood –’ he brandished the other pistol that would be his part in the melodrama – ‘if I was to shoot him dead in the street in broad daylight, nobody would much care.’
‘In any neighborhood, I should say,’ remarked Chloë. She set her satchel on the marble-topped parlor table and withdrew a traveling chess-set and a volume of Suetonius. It had been agreed that she would wait at the boarding house for the results of Pease’s abduction, and Chloë was not a woman who was ever unprepared.
‘Why can’t Poe be the Master Villain?’ pleaded Henri.
‘Because Pease might recognize me as the man who kept the whole tavern in an uproar for an hour and a half last night.’
‘And we are not the villains of this piece!’ added Dominique firmly. ‘We are the … the terror of wrongdoers, the avenging angels who survey the hearts of the wicked and see all!’
‘I’m glad someone can see something!’ complained Henri as his fellow-conspirators hustled him out of the boarding house to where his rented carriage waited for him in K Street.
‘You don’t have to, darling.’ Dominique slipped his spectacles into his breast pocket. Standing on the gravel path that led from the door to the street, in the pale noon sunlight she had far more the appearance of a wife, in her spring gown of jonquil muslin with its bright green ribbons, though neither he nor she would ever have touched hands, or given the smallest sign of physical intimacy, in Chloë’s presence.
Chloë, in her plain, elegantly-cut white linen and thick spectacles, resembled nothing so much as a schoolgirl sister – except that Henri’s four sisters all resembled Henri, like large, plump, amiable sheep.
‘Just sound stern and fierce and clever, as if you really had broken into the King’s Head and found those things in that horrid man’s desk drawer …’
‘Pretend you’re playing Shylock,’ urged Chloë. ‘You do an excellent Shylock.’
‘Lord, yes!’ Poe stroked his mustache like a stage villain. ‘A fat and oily spider who knows all, sitting at the center of his web …’
‘Oh, all right.’ Henri clambered up into the coach and shut the door. ‘But I thought we brought Benjamin along to do things like this.’
‘And I have racked my brains,’ agreed January patiently, ‘for a method by which a black man can hold up a white one at gunpoint in the streets of Washington and force information out of him, and have arrived at the conclusion that it cannot be done. And I thank you, sir,’ he added sincerely, ‘for taking it on yourself to help me in this. For I think we’re closing in on the riddle of what became of Mr Singletary. When we find his grave, it may tell us a good deal about who put him there. The trail may be cold, but at least we can talk to the man who saw his body just after his death.’
He pulled his wide-brimmed hat more closely down over his eyes and climbed up to the old-fashioned footman’s stand on the back of the coach. Poe, muffled in a scarf that the chilly air made more convincing, flapped the reins, and the rented team trotted out smartly into Connecticut Avenue. Out here there were few wagons and foot-passengers – grocery carts, a milk wagon, and now and then a more fashionable tilbury bound to or from Georgetown – but as they crossed K Street traffic thickened. Around Lafayette Square, Poe steered between the smart, closed broughams of the diplomatic and Senatorial wives – out performing the de rigueur duty of ‘leaving cards upon’ one another – and the cursing teamsters en route to the Treasury site, then made his way down Pennsylvania Avenue through the heart of the town.
At this hour, the saloons south of Pennsylvania Avenue were opening for business. Rough-clothed men loitered around
the doors or lounged on the benches outside, chewing, smoking, and reading newspapers as they waited for the day-labor that the saloon-keepers brokered for them with carters and construction bosses. Whether one sought employment driving mules or copying Navy lists, finding it was largely a matter of who one knew.
Poe drew up the carriage a dozen feet short of the King’s Head and dismounted the box, an anonymous figure in slouched hat, scarf, and high collar against the cloud-flash of the heatless sun. January walked to the saloon’s door.
‘Mr Pease?’ he called into the dark cavern – he knew better than to walk through the front door of any establishment that catered to white men. ‘Gennelmun here to see you, sir.’ He saluted with his whip: See, I’m an innocent coachman, and the gennelmun outside is wealthy enough to keep such a thing.
Within, he observed, a solid wooden bar stretched the entire width of the room. A hall on the north side – there was a door to his left on the outside wall – probably communicated with the stairway that led to the lodgers’ rooms. Another door from the barroom led into it, and a third, as he had observed the previous night, gave access from behind the bar into the hall and thence the storeroom, an arrangement that meant that whoever was behind the bar could keep the patrons away from the good liquor.
‘He’ll come out when he’s finished his goddam chores,’ retorted Miss Drail’s brazen voice. She stood behind the bar, washing glasses in a tin basin.
‘To hell with you, woman.’ Wylie Pease threw the broom he wielded into a corner, kicked it when it bounced off the wall and fell in his path, and untied his apron as he strode to the door. ‘Who is it?’
‘Mr Wellesley, sir.’ January named one of the surgeons they’d encountered on their rounds. ‘This way, sir.’
Evidently, going to speak to surgical gentlemen at their carriages was no new experience for Pease. He followed January without a blink.
Good Man Friday Page 19